The Cold Civil Heats Up-In Fear For The Republic-Dump The Trump-No More Years-Channeling Robert F. Kennedy, 1968- Winnowing Out The Challengers-Who Has The Stomach To Go Down In The Mud To Take Back This Country-Kamala (Finally Got It Right) Harris In Portsmouth, NH February 19th
An on-going series until January 20, 2021 by Frank Jackman
These days, these anguished fearful days I find myself increasingly channeling beloved Robert F. Kennedy, laid low by an assassin’s bullet in 1968 just when his high tide was coming in. In those days among other things which I will get around to later in this series when I have little off-hand time for sweet schoolboy reminiscences I was fearful for the Republic, was worried that things were getting so out of hand what with the no end in sight Vietnam War blazing and dividing the country in almost civil war terms then as well, viciously suppressed inner city black community uprisings and the political low road ascendant with one Richard Milhous Nixon and one George Wallace scorching the earth all forms of political death were in the air including assassinations of political leaders.
At that time, that 1968 what knows what will happen time, being a good old Massachusetts boy who at fourteen years of age had knocked on doors and distributed leaflets for one of our own, our Irish boy made good, Jack Kennedy in the fall of 1960 (while also having in that period attended a nuclear disarmament rally on Boston Common sponsored by what would later be called “peaceniks” but were mainly Quakers and pacifists to show the contradictions of the times, and the contradictions of one Frank Jackman) I could name the villain of the piece. One Richard Milhous Nixon, petty criminal, low-blow artist and bum of the month who would go to be President of the United States (POTUS henceforth in today’s Twitter-speak) before the wheels went off his train and he sulked his way to eternal infamy out in the Pacific Japan currents.
I would not have put the matter of my concerns in those days as being fearful for the Republic but in retrospect that is what got me off my dime to go and work like seven whirling dervishes for beloved Robert Kennedy all along the East Coast, working with everybody from idealistic “seek a newer world” college students like myself (not then knowing that RFK had “cribbed” that expression from Alfred Lord Tennyson on the fly but that was okay then, and now) to the old-time still standing ward healer bosses like Meade Esposito and Carmen De Sapio in hothouse New York. Though nothing of earnestly committing to what was a united front of all those against the devil, unblessed RMN. These days when I have been able to articulate better my fears I have the same sinking feelings that we are in for continued hard times if we don’t take this country back from the night-takers and new league of bums of the month headed by one Donald Trump, POTUS, petty thief, Putin’s poodle and every evil associated with RMN writ large. One wag said memorially “Nixon on steroids.”
I headlined this piece which will be a continuing watch word in this series from now until the next presidential inauguration in 2021 with the dire warning that the cold civil war that has gripped this country for the last couple of decades has over the past few years and particularly the past couple heated up. Heated up enough to get me off my own dime-again. Made me realize that whatever else I might think about the virtues and vices of a Republic (especially against the long discredited “divine right of kings” which seems to be the operating principle if that is the right term to be used in anything talk related to this current administration that is in play now) it is easier, much easier to work my left-wing politics under the norms of a Republic than having to look over my shoulder and worry about being sent to the bastinado every time I get my dander up to go out on the streets and get “uppity” around some cause.
That feeling has not been one that I have personally operated on for a long time, mainly going about my left-wing business out in the streets without feeling I was headed to some dire blackhole fate. Let me be clear although my experiences in the American Army during Vietnam War times (at a time when Richard Milhous Nixon was ironically my “commander-in-chief”) pushed me in a very different direction from those heady Spring of 1968 days when I was planning to be a consummate bourgeois politician (mucking around with Esposito and DeSapio serving as an apprenticeship) I had not felt a need to worry about the fate of the Republic, one way or the other. Now all bets are off. Now I am ready to make a pact with the devil, make a united front with all who wish to oppose this drift away from even basic democratic republican values.
So right now, I and a few others, unfortunately not any of my old-time neighborhood corner boys from the Acre in North Adamsville who continue to declare a “pox on both houses,” Democratic and Republican, are working through how to most effectively work to get the country back. Right now, that means, and this is hard for me to say after fifty years of purposefully working against or avoiding the Democratic Party and its various candidates and working instead on the issues, mostly around war and peace, I, we are doing our own personal winnowing out of the candidates, announced and unannounced, who look to challenge the Donald come 2020. Right now, as well we are policy wonks looking to see who has the best projected program if they actually defeat Trump and want to implement things to turn this place around.
Today, today in February 2019, a long year away from the main actions for nominations I have already staked some ground out in what I am looking for in winnowing out candidates. This is where beloved Robert Kennedy rears his head again. Bobby, yeah, let me call him Bobby, could spin pure gold with his visions and his quasi-Irish poet understandings and cut your balls off the next minute if you opposed Jack or wanted to take the low road on some issue important to him-you would wind up in political Siberia and even your family would not weep for your exile. Then, and now too, just my kind of candidate. (In that poetic sweepstakes his then Democratic Party opponent after Lyndon Johnson fell into a crying fit and quit Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy was the real poet without Bobby’s ruthless streak though)
Today as the field expands to some exponentially impossible number what I am looking for since there are plenty of candidates with at least minimally supportable programs is what I would call the character issue for short. All the great programs in the world will, as is graphically clear these days when things are actually being driven the other way, are so much dust, so much hot air if a candidate does not understand from the past three years at least, that 2020 will be a “street fight,” a nasty affair no question. The question I and my co-thinkers these days will be posing point-blank and in person if candidates show up in Massachusetts or New Hampshire, maybe Maine is do they have the stomach to go down the low road to get elected, to go “down in the mud” with Trump to become POTUS. More, much more later.
*******
A first wetting of the feet as communicated to those who are part of a an expanding cohort who are looking for and ready to back one candidate who we feel can win first the Democratic Party nomination and then whip the tyrant’s ass:
Report Back From Kamala Harris 2020 Presidential Campaign Event-Portsmouth, NH -February 18, 2019-
Forward this e-mail to interested parties in your social network who are looking at 2020 in early 2019 so therefore untamed political animals like us.
This report was written before I received news that Senator Bernie Sanders had entered the race for the White House. I am wondering whether the very positive turn out for Kamala Harris in Portsmouth forced his hand a bit or whether this was his game plan all along.
[This a contribution to our on-going conversation about who to support in the 2020 Presidential election cycle in an attempt to gather a cohort of like-mined organizers around one candidate, if possible, to have a greater impact on the selected campaign and candidate.
We have generally agreed that right now we are “window shopping” as the various campaigns roll out and splash in New Hampshire and that is probably best until the Spring anyway if not until June when the first debates take place. We have also generally agreed and if I am wrong chime in that “winnability” is a key factor up to a point (the Biden point). I would only add here the other factor I am looking at since I think we also generally agree that 2020 will be a down and dirty “street fight.” All the candidates have “the fire in the belly” or else they would have backed off like Deval Patrick and others, but do they have “the stomach to go down in the mud” against Trump, not in kind for that is worthless but to show some serious grit. Fight the low blows from the start when they will, hell, have already come. This time out it is sadly the low road or no road. I’d like other opinions on what amounts to this “character” issue. Frank Jackman]
********
Pat Riley, Connie Kelly and Frank Jackman attended this event
Pat, Connie and I arrived about 3 PM for the event scheduled from 4-6 PM at the U/U Church in downtown Portsmouth and found we were “late.” (Yawn, what place would you expect Sen. Harris to speak at but a U/U venue, right U/U partisan Bob Williams). What we found was that there was a line that extended around a few blocks and we were pissed off that we had not come earlier as originally planned since we did not expect to get in and did not want to watch the event out in the street in the snow and cold on the screen the campaign had set up.
We did get in although up in the balcony which precluded our being able to ask the Senator any questions. The crowd was estimated by the fire department I believe to be over one thousand. I am not sure whether that included the hundred to one hundred and fifty who watched on the hallowed basement of the church where an additional screen was positioned. The size of the crowd surprised me as I figured that based on the snow, the distance from the February 2020 primary, and the lesser name recognition of the candidate, that maybe a couple of hundred diehards would show. (Connie was the only one who thought she would draw a big crowd.) The crowd, a mix of young and old, the vast majority white, the state by the 2010 census was 2% black and 93% white which must make it one of the whitest states in the country, was patient maybe reflecting the old New England character with our freaking weather.
The event pretty much ran on time and ended on time with not much pre-speech build-up except an introduction by a NH state senator whose name I didn’t get and who is chairing the Harris campaign in NH. In her fairly short speech Senator Harris, as all serious politicians do, honed-in on her stump issues. Her overall theme was that while acknowledging the deep divides in America that we as a nation have more in common that what separates us. For now, she is going the high road as she works out the kinks in her message. Senator Harris seems to be staking out a position on the left-supporting the litmus test issues-Medicare for All, Green New Deal Plan, No Wall, a more humane immigration policy, serious attention to the impending disasters with climate change, fighting the opioid addiction problem (acute in NH). She addressed other issues in the question and answer period generally on a left-liberal, progressive agenda line. What was not addressed in either segment were any issues around the huge military budget or foreign policy which I am not sure was by design or because she was playing to her audience.
Speaking of audience when it came time for question and answers, I am not sure whether campaigns “plan” this stuff, but all the questions she receives were “soft ball” hit out of the ball park things. This is where in response to questions she answered that she favored a comprehensive prescription drug policy, more help for the elderly and chronically ill, support to the union and union organizing movement in answer to a question from a former Portsmouth Naval base worker (although nothing about the fight for $15), support for an NH bill fighting against voter suppression and making it easier to register and vote (which drew one of the big applauses of the day), increased gun ownership requirement invoking Parkland and other horrors, and support for stripping the bastard Columbus of his designated day and making the day Indigenous Peoples Day.
*******
I made a special effort to talk to people to see why they had come because frankly I was impressed not only by the turnout but how they found out about the event and why they were there as I grabbed as much on the ground political intelligence as I could. Granted it has been a long time since I have been involved in presidential politics but I wondered how much of the crowd turnout for Senator Harris reflected her very public role grilling Brent Kavanaugh at the Judiciary Committee hearings (a lot), being a woman (a fair amount), being an interracial woman (hard to tell but important in the long run), and having a much better organization on the ground than I would has suspected in NH this early (by comparison somebody I talked who had been at a Sen. Booker event in Portsmouth on Saturday and said it was very much smaller).
Of course, the elephant in the room, especially for the young (many of whom I saw busily texting during the event) is the role of social media in the organizing efforts. In other conversations after the event I talked to longtime NH residents who told me that every four years this stuff is a rite of passage and there is a certain “competition” to see who goes to the most events, etc. So that is an element as well as is the fact greater Portsmouth unlike say North Conway or places like that is a Democratic Party stronghold, especially with the conversion of Pease AF base to civilian uses and increased working class jobs and more affordable housing in the area in places like Exeter (even fairly rural Newfield about twenty miles away and the home of the governor Hilary polled 68%)
Evaluation based solely on this event: Senator Harris as an experienced politician is good on her feet in answering questions. Her style also reflected her obvious personal concern for the downtrodden, the hurt and the underappreciated in this society and her own life story which she alluded to at several points. While I am far from being ready to dismiss her candidacy like I have done on others I left the event not feeling strongly that she has “the stomach to go down in the mud” with Trump and his crazed supporters. It will take a less friendly environment to see how she reacts.
Final notes: Pat and I were interviewed by NBC News (not bad for day one of our campaign) and Friendly Toast has good food for those of us who will be seeing more of the Seacoast area in the next year that we thought possible. (That Friendly visit via some gift certificates I won in our last VFP live fund-raiser so all the sweeter.)
We are disappointed but not disheartened by the failure of the summit between President Trump and Chairman Kim Jong-un to reach an agreement. Early indications are that the U.S. moved the goal posts at the insistence of National Security Advisor John Bolton. 
Visit our website to learn more about joining the organization or donating to Massachusetts Peace Action!
